How to Tell if You're From a Small Town

J. Cole is a fairly famous rapper from Fayetteville, North Carolina.  I'm from a small town about 25 miles from Fayetteville.  It has recently come to my attention that J. Cole also thinks he is from a small town and it's kind of breaking my brain.  Earlier this week I listened to the live album Forest Hills Drive, recorded in Fayetteville.  After performing the song "St. Tropez" Mr. Cole explains that it's about coming from a small town and dreaming of more.  This is perplexing me because Fayetteville already has so much more than my town does, like twenty times the population for starters.  I love movies and comic books but there are no movie theaters or comic book stores in my town.  Fayetteville has more than one of both, which is why I drive for 45 minutes every other weekend or so to watch movies and buy comics.  Actually, my town does have two closed down movie theaters, neither of which has shown a movie to the public in over a decade or ever had more than two screens.  Fayetteville has a half dozen fully operational multiplexes, and a mall, and a good sized airport, and the single largest military base on the planet.  This is not a small town, it is a medium sized city.  In his defense, J. Cole is not alone in this delusion.  Taylor Swift also seems to think that she came from a small town, as evidenced by her 2010 song "Mean," in which she declares her intentions to move to a big city.  It could be from the point of view of a much younger Swift who lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, but it is more likely from the perspective of 2010 Swift who had lived in Nashville, one of America's most famous cities and headquarters to the massive country music industry, for the better part of a decade.  I worry that an epidemic is on its way that causes celebrities to be confused about the size of their hometowns so I've come up with a few guidelines to help keep things straight.

You have to leave the town on a regular basis to get the things you want

As previously mentioned, I drive 25 miles to Fayetteville a couple of times a month to enjoy the big city amenities denied to me in my actual small town.  I also work in another city smaller than Fayetteville.  Actually, most people I know have jobs outside of the town they live in.  Small town life is defined by a relative scarcity of resources.  On TV every hamlet has one of everything, but in my experience everything is a little more spread out.  You can get what you want but it's going to eat up some your precious time and gas money.  You can go to a city like Fayetteville that is lacking very little, or you can go to the movie theater in one town or the bowling alley in another or the shopping center in another.  In modern day America living in a small town means leaving it.

You can say "It's a small town you've probably never heard of" and be right

Small towns typically don't have much name recognition.  If a stranger from a distant part of the country is aware of your city and knows what state it's in you are not from a small town.  Nashville is a world famous city and bears a name synonymous with an entire genre of music.  Fayetteville is part of a triangle with North Carolina's capital Raleigh and another major city, Durham.  If someone knows Raleigh and Durham, there's a decent chance they know Fayetteville.  When TV personalities do local promos they say "What's up Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville."  If Seth Meyers has frequently said the name of your city it is definitely a city.

It takes less than a minute to read the Wikipedia page

An extensive Wikipedia page means two things: there's a lot to know about the topic and someone(s) cared enough about it to put all that information in one place.  The bigger the city the bigger the Wikipedia page.  The page for Fayetteville is about five times the size of some nearby actual small towns.  Small towns are boring.  They don't have identities and there's nothing interesting about them.  Their only claim to fame is the two or three people who made it out and made it big, but usually not big enough for anyone to care about them, including the people in the town.  Fayetteville's "Notable People" section alone takes up almost as much space as my town's entire Wikipedia page.  That is not a small town.

Is This a Good Time For Taylor Swift to Return to Country Music?

For the past two years I've been on a righteous quest to remind the world that Taylor Swift was a country singer three years ago.  Everyone wants to believe that she emerged fully formed as a glamorous pop star like Athena (and Kanye thinks it was from his enormous head) but I remember the other Taylor.  The girl with the bedazzled cheek and a six-string.  Recently Swift got caught in a white lie and found herself in some mildly hot water.  It's entirely possible for her to bounce back from this and continue her life as one of several queens of pop, but I think she would be better off moving forward by turning around, going back to the small pond in which she was once the biggest fish.  I've argued before that Taylor Swift should eventually return to country music but there may never be a better time than now.

First, let's recap Swift's career up to this point.  Her very first single was 2006's "Tim McGraw."  That's the title.  Her very first song was named after Nashville superstar Tim McGraw and was about McGraw's music reminding Swift and her ex of each other whenever they hear it.  "Tim McGraw" performed pretty well on the charts but her next single "Teardrops on My Guitar" was her true breakthrough.  It peaked at number two on Billboard Country and seven on Billboard Pop.  (I remember it being much bigger than that due to the passion it inspired in the female population of my rural high school.)  Those early songs from Swift's self-titled debut set the precedent for the six years that followed.  She made songs that were perhaps more pop than country but still more country than anything by the parade of tight-jeaned douche boys pandering their keyword crammed escapism that was going on at the same time and continues to this day.

Then, in 2012 Swift released her fourth album Red, the ultimate experiment in country-pop with dense production and touches of dubstep (it was 2012).  Of course, that was followed by 1989, Swift's first 100% pop album that is frankly a masterpiece.  I don't have a single bad word to say about the album itself but I also can't help but feel betrayed on behalf of her former genre, a community which inherently prizes conservative values including loyalty (and prizes Conservative values because it's Convenient).  I'm not one to stand in the way of someone's artistic growth but I have to wonder if that growth had to be in an obviously more profitable direction.  There was a time when that would have been called "selling out."

Now, less than two years after Swift gained all those new fans with a more polished style and persona her adoring public has turned on her and the discrepancy between the two Taylor's is to blame.  In April of this year Kanye West released a song with the line "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/Why? I made that bitch famous," referencing the infamous incident when West interrupted Swift's acceptance speech on the national stage of the VMA's.  West claimed that Swift personally approved the line before its release, a claim that Swift's camp resolutely denied.  Last Sunday West's wife Kim Kardashian posted a Snapchat video of West on the phone with Swift in which she can be heard giving her unequivocal permission.  In the beginning Swift sounds enthusiastic but as it goes on it sounds like she doesn't approve at all of the implication that she owes her career to hip-hop's douchiest genius or that she owes him sex for it.  It sounds like she's just too afraid of conflict so she tries harder and harder to justify her initial consent.  Despite all the megastar bravado the sweet, sensitive country girl was too nice to start a fight.  Then, after the song came out the pop star returned and fought against the attack on her image through lies and deception.  For a few days before the Republican National Convention really heated up, the once universally beloved Taylor Swift became social media's villain of the week.

Interestingly, Kim's video begins with a stark reminder of Swift's past.  Apparently, her phone number still has a Nashville area code.  Maybe it's a sign that she should go back.  Instead of riding it out and continuing as a popstar I would like to see Taylor Swift return to her roots and then go deeper.  This is the perfect time for it because country music itself is going backwards in the best possible way.  Artists like Chris Stapleton, Kacey Musgraves, and Sturgill Simpson are leading the genre in the direction of a renaissance by making more traditional, stripped down country music instead of the flashy arena pop-rock that has dominated Nashville for years.  I'm talking about a Taylor Swift alt-country album.  The genre is fit to burst with creativity in the coming years.  When Swift was working on 1989 no one would have guessed that Simpson was about to become a superstar on the back of a cosmic spiritual concept album.

All due respect to Max Martin but if Swift dropped him in favor of Dave Cobb, the producer of Stapleton's Traveler and  Simpson's Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, the results could be really fascinating.  Swift moved to Nashville to become a country star when she was 14 then devoted ten of her 26 years to the genre.  If Taylor Swift thinks that's more than enough time to give to the style and audience that actually did make her famous then I certainly can't argue, but if she wants to have a Pure Country moment and sing about the "heartland," if she wants to be part of what could be a historic artistic movement, well, I would wager that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian won't be at the CMA's any time soon.

What 'Bad Blood' Says About Taylor Swift's Departure from Country Music

Last year Taylor Swift released her first full-blownsies no-country pop album, 1989.  As someone who has listened to a lot of country, both good and bad, and has recently found an appreciation for the genre when done well I am always in favor of country artists experimenting with other genres, even if it means leaving them all together.  At least, I'm assuming I'm in favor of it.  As far as I know Taylor is the only person with the guts to leave country entirely.  When Garth Brooks tried to temporarily go alt-rock/pop he had to create an entirely new Australian identity.  Even with all that the Chris Gaines experiment is still seen as one of the biggest missteps in Brooks' career, which was at Swift-esque levels at the time.  1989 has certainly fared better than Garth Brooks in... The Life of Chris Gaines but no one is worried about Taylor Swift's career.  I'm only curious about her ties to country music and her own past.

Has anyone ever seen Chris Gaines and Taylor Swift in the same room?

As previously mentioned, I personally went several years without listening to much country music but I found a new respect for the form thanks largely to artists like Lydia Loveless.  Lydia grew up surrounded by country music before she spent a few years in the punk scene of Ohio.  Then she combined the two forms seamlessly, showing the creative potential for country music, garnering critical acclaim, and becoming one of my favorite musicians in the process (for what that's worth).  That's what I would like to see from Taylor.  She has clearly changed a lot over the past few years and I would like to see the new Swift merge with the old to create something entirely different and unique, but I think Taylor may be done with country for quite a while.

One significant difference between Swift and Loveless and Brooks is that Taylor has been inching towards pop for years.  Her 2012 album Red was noticeably more pop than country, featuring collaborations with hit making producer Max Martin.  Still, I never thought she would burn the bridge to country until the music video for 1989's "Bad Blood".  The basic concept of "Bad Blood" is getting Taylor's famous friends together so they can do cool action movie stuff and not one of those friends is a country singer.

It's not like there's a shortage of badass women in country music.  Miranda Lambert has built a career on strutting all cool like and burning things.  Recently she and Carrie Underwood robbed a bank together in their own action movie homage.  The only thing stopping Brandy Clark from killing her cheating beau is that she hates stripes and fifteen years earlier the Dixie Chicks decided it was worth the risk to take out a domestic abuser.  Around that time Shania Twain was in her own CGI sci-fi music video.  Before most of these women and the one's in "Bad Blood" (and some of them's parents) were even born Loretta Lynn was threatening to take homewreckers to "Fist City" and getting kicked off the radio for promoting contraception.  The first part especially might not be relevant to modern feminism but it was badass as heck.

Another country candidate for "Bad Blood" is Faith Hill, who might not have a lot of badass credential but Taylor named her song "This Kiss" as one of her biggest influences in Rolling Stone.  She emphasized the crossover appeal but it's still probably the most significant acknowledgement of her country past that Taylor has made in a year or more.  Make no mistake, Taylor's past was full of country.  Her first hit was named after Hill's husband and fellow country superstar Tim McGraw.  Her first album is full of rural imagery like screen doors and pick up trucks.  On her third album's "Mean" she even threw in a little bluegrass.

In that song Taylor revealed that her ambition was to live in a "big ol' city," because staying in the styx isn't good enough.  This is probably the least country thing about Taylor Swift.  Country singers tend to love the country and despise the city.  It's one of the most frustrating cliche's of the genre.  For instance, "Homeboy" from Eric Church's otherwise excellent album Chief the city is associated with "hip hop hats," saggy pants, and cussing at and physically accosting your parents while the country is associated with trucks and beer and high school sweethearts.  If the only way Taylor can grow as an artist is to leave overly simplistic stereotypes like that behind than I only look forward to what comes next.  However, in my experience country can be much more complex than that.  It can be a Gaga-esque ode to self love, or political (and not necessarily conservative), or personal and passionate, or, believe it or not, even upbeat and cheerful.  It would be a shame if country loses Taylor Swift forever but it will be alright without her.